Episode 22. Raise the Red Lanterns
With the blade still pressed under his chin, Cha Seong-tae stared up at it and answered,
“Why are you suddenly doing this? These bastards had nothing to do with me. They were always hanging off U-geum and Jun-gu. You saw me kill them with your own eyes. I had no idea they were gonna pull this crap either.”
I said,
“Think it through properly. You sure none of this is on you…?”
Seong-tae actually took a moment, brow furrowed, and then replied in a low voice,
“Nothing… wait. No, there is.”
“What.”
He admitted it honestly.
“…I told those two more than once, ‘That tavern boy got scary strong all of a sudden. You’d better be careful.’ I was being careful, but they didn’t seem to take it nearly as seriously as I did. Thinking about it now, that’s on me.”
He’d nailed it.
I asked,
“So what are you going to do now? At this rate I’ll have to kill half the men in Ilyang before this kind of thing stops. Want me to?”
“No need for that. Just tell me what to do. I’ll do it.”
I answered,
“I already told you before. You don’t talk down to me anymore. Not in front of me, not in front of anyone. Every bastard in Ilyang knows I was the lowly boy working at Jahak Inn. I’m going to build Hao Sect from here, and if you keep treating me like I’m some errand boy, I’ll be swinging this blade every other day.”
I shrugged.
“Doesn’t bother me. I won’t be the one dying in those fights.”
“But because you’re the first to take me lightly, people who don’t need to die keep ending up as corpses.”
“You’re right. I admit it.”
“From now on, you dress me up however you like. Make me sound terrifying… say all the people who got on my bad side are already dead.”
“That’s just the truth.”
“Then exaggerate it. Make it worse. Tell them I’m more vicious, more merciless, crazier than the rumors say. Stronger than even you think.”
“Yes.”
“You being scared of me comes first. Then your underlings will be scared. Now and in the future.”
“I understand completely now.”
“My real skill? I don’t even need to show half of it in this backwater. If you don’t plan on spending the rest of your life hauling corpses, let’s do this properly.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s do it right.”
“I’ll do it right.”
Only then did I pull the sword away and say,
“Give me your outer robe.”
A vein popped on Seong-tae’s forehead.
“…Sorry?”
The moment he realized this kind of thoughtless slip was exactly what led us here, he slapped himself hard and hurriedly corrected,
“Ah, of course. I should take it off for you. My mouth keeps getting ahead of me.”
He smacked his own cheek once and handed me his coat.
I slipped into Cha Seong-tae’s robe and glanced at the corpses.
“They’re low-grade trash. They don’t even know what happens when they pick a fight.”
Seong-tae asked,
“What about U-geum and Jun-gu?”
“Looked like they had some business on the other side. Left in a hurry.”
“Ah, that so. Busy guys.”
He looked genuinely sad that people he knew had died, even if they weren’t close.
“Back in the day, U-geum and Jun-gu once told me we should gather some guys and kill the Jo brothers. If I hadn’t stopped them back then, they’d have died first.”
“That so?”
“Yeah. This time they didn’t even bother asking me. Just went and pulled this stunt on their own. That alone proves we were never exactly friends.”
“Impressive logic.”
We got back to Maehwa House together, and Seong-tae said,
“Go in and rest. I’ll gather the boys and clean up the corpses. Otherwise we’ll have a plague on our hands. There’s too many bodies piling up.”
“Not at this level.”
I glanced around the chaotic first floor of Maehwa House and headed up the stairs. Business had been dead for days. Hard to blame anyone—fights breaking out every other night will do that.
It was partly my fault.
But it was also a necessary growing pain.
As I climbed, all the workers downstairs stopped what they were doing, staring up at me in silence.
I paused with one hand resting on the banister and looked over everyone working in Maehwa House.
“What?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Tell everyone you know: anyone who comes at me will end up like this. At least in Ilyang, no one should be making plans about what to do with me. You’ve all seen how it ends.”
“Understood.”
“Close up for the day. No drinks, no entertainment. If you want to mourn the dead, do it quietly.”
“All right.”
Maehwa House fell still.
Before returning to the late Jo I-gyeol’s room, I washed up again.
In my mind, it was still his room. Once Jahak Inn was rebuilt, I planned to move out anyway.
Sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, I heard a song start somewhere in Maehwa House.
The voice was good.
It was a song I recognized—Chehyang was singing.
The title was “Grass by the Clear Riverbank” (淸淸河畔草).
In the song, a courtesan-turned-wife sits by the window of a fine pavilion under the moonlight, brushing on red powder, extending her pale hand. She used to be a courtesan, now she’s the wife of some wastrel… but the bastard no longer comes home, and she laments having to guard the empty bed alone.
In the lyrics are words like cheongcheong (clear, bright), ulul (dense, heavy), yeongyeong (full, glistening), gyogyo (white, shining), a-a (slim, pretty), seomseom (delicate, fine).
On their own, they’re not exactly innocent words.
Paired with the right voice, every one of them paints skin, curves, hidden places, the feel of the night, the subtleties of coupling, a woman’s gentle seduction.
Of course, you could interpret it more cleanly.
But there’s one line that seals it: 空床難獨守—“It’s hard to guard an empty bed alone.”
After you sing clear-clear, lush-lush, full-full, bright-bright, pretty-pretty, delicate-delicate in a sweet voice, and then say you can’t stand guarding an empty bed by yourself… what do you think that means?
It’s a seduction song. In martial circles, we’d call it a soul-bewitching technique.
Plenty of pretty rogue women in heavy makeup would sing that exact song, clean out some naive righteous sect disciple’s purse, and if that was all, he’d be lucky. Most of them died for it.
Anyway, none of that works on me.
I went back to my breathing exercises.
And, for the record, Chehyang didn’t count as a beauty by my standards.
To me, someone only becomes a true beauty when they have a decent heart.
When Cheongcheongha Banch’o finally ended, another song started right away.
My focus slipped for a second, and I opened my eyes and bellowed,
“Shut it!”
The shout, weighted with inner force, rolled through the entire building and the singing cut off at once.
On the top floor of Maehwa House, I spoke in the same booming tone, loud enough for everyone present to hear clearly.
“Take down the blue lanterns and hang red ones.”
Cha Seong-tae, who’d just come back from sending orders to clean up the bodies, heard me from the first floor and immediately echoed,
“Take down the blue lanterns and hang red ones!”
I called out again,
“The geinyeo—the performance girls—can stay. But the ones working as prostitutes are to find other work. From now on Maehwa, Ehwa, and Siwha will all operate as red houses. If any customer comes in here trying to act like it’s still a ‘green’ house, report it to me.”
Seong-tae repeated the important part loudly,
“From now on we operate as red houses!”
Region to region, meanings differ, but generally speaking, red houses enforce the rule of “selling art, not the body” far more strictly than green houses.
I’m crazy in a lot of ways, but I’ve never been crazy about money.
There was no need for women to keep selling their bodies in the place I was staying.
“Seong-tae…”
He answered briefly from downstairs, then came pounding up the stairs two steps at a time. After sprinting up four flights, he stopped at my door and said,
“You called?”
“The bodies?”
“I told them to take care of it and came right back.”
“Ehwa and Siwha too. They’re red houses now.”
“Yes.”
“Anyone with a home to go back to, send them off with a fat severance out of the Jo brothers’ assets. Especially the girls who were working purely as whores—send all of them out. Only keep the ones who want to learn proper performance arts or do other work. I’m sick of the sight otherwise.”
“Understood.”
“Tell the men this, too: if they cause trouble, I’ll come kill them myself. And one more time, get Jahak Inn rebuilt quickly. This room smells weird, and the bedding’s too expensive—I can’t sleep right.”
“I’ll pass it on.”
“Get lost.”
“Yes, I’ll vanish.”
Once I sent Cha Seong-tae away, I went straight back to my breathing and circulation.
Everything else fell away.
The Black Cat Gang, Black Fan Fort, the Twelve Divine Generals, their master, the dead Jo brothers, the Twin Ghosts of the Ring Sabers—one by one they showed themselves in my mind, and one by one I tore them to pieces with the sword of my heart and erased them.
By dawn, I’d finished another full cycle of circulation, and only when the sun began to rise did I finally lie down to sleep.
Today, I figured, I could sleep in peace.
Against exhaustion, even “hard to guard an empty bed alone” doesn’t stand a chance.
I slept straight through until noon.
In my dream, a man appeared—someone I didn’t recognize. He was trapped in a prison cell.
I couldn’t remember the conversation when I woke, but I knew one thing:
Because of me, he was going to be in that prison for a very, very long time.
I opened my eyes with a faint sense of guilt toward that stranger.
Only after about thirty days did the skeleton of Jahak Inn’s new structure start to take shape. The plot was big, so the inn itself was turning out huge.
In the meantime, the lead builder had been replaced, though I hadn’t bothered meeting him yet.
But just from looking at the new layout—how the spaces were sectioned off, how the base structure was mapped—I could picture the finished building in my head. Everything was tidy, efficient, and well-planned.
Finally, it felt like a real professional had taken over.
The old Jahak Inn, with its moldy corners and sagging beams, was gone. In its place, the largest inn in Ilyang was rising.
An inn is meant to serve as lodging, too.
The old Jahak Inn had been basically just a shabby roadside joint with a few cheap rooms for pack carriers and peddlers.
The one going up now was big enough to host a whole caravan from a top escort bureau.
And this place would be Hao Sect’s temporary headquarters.
I stood on the still-empty central ground and pictured what would fill it—Hao Sect members drinking and eating together. Among them would be rivals from my past life, old foes, people who had once been my enemies.
I was planning to round up those insane monkeys and keep them all here as Hao Sect men.
Change the fate of the monkeys, and the balance of the martial world would shift with them.
“What are you thinking so deeply about?”
Cha Seong-tae came up behind me as I stared at the open space.
I asked,
“When do you think it’ll be finished?”
“With how big the project’s gotten, even at top speed, more than a year, I’d say. Too slow?”
“What if we throw in more men?”
“You can’t just hurl bodies at it and expect it to go faster. It depends on who’s leading the construction. If the new chief builder is competent, it’ll go faster. You should probably meet him at least once.”
Seong-tae called out to a man moving among the workers.
“The Sect Leader is here. Come say hello.”
The moment I saw the man walking toward us, I couldn’t stop the smile tugging at my lips.
Yeon Ja-seong, huh. Been a long time.
Back when I was leading Hao Sect, he was already a famous architect. Now he was walking toward me with a much younger face.